How to Program a Spring with Hibernate web app? - spring

I am Working on web application where i have 90 fields for a Person class which are divided in to family details,education details, personal details etc....
I want separate form for each, like for family details has-father name, mother name siblings etc... fields and so on for other
I want separate table for each detail with common reference id for all tables
My question is how many bean classes should i write? Is it with one bean class can i map from multiple forms to multiple tables?
class PersonRegister{
private Long iD;
private String emailID;
private String password;
.
.
}//for register.......
once logged in i need to maintain his/her details
Either
class person{
}
or
class PersonFamilyDetails{}
class PersonEducationDetails{}
etc
which way software developing standards specify to create?

Don't go overboard, I believe in your case single but very wide (i.e. with a lot of columns) table would be most efficient and simplest from maintenance perspective. Only thing to keep in mind is too query only for a necessary subset of columns/fields when loading lots of rows. Otherwise you'll be fetching kilobytes of unnecessary data, not needed for particular use case.
Unfortunately Hibernate doesn't have direct support for that, when designing a mapping for Person, you'll end up with huge class and even worse - Hibernate will always fetch all simple columns (and many-to-one relationships). You can however overcome this problem either by creating several views in the database containing only subset of columns or by having several Java classes mapping to the same table but only to subset of columns.
Splitting your database model into several tables is beneficial only if your schema is not normalized. E.g. when storing siblings first name and last name you may wish to have a separate Sibling table and next time some other family member is entered, you can reuse the same row. This makes database smaller and might be faster when searching by sibling.

Your question comes down to database normalization, as described in-depth by Boyce and Codd, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization.
The main advantage of database normalization is avoiding modification anomalies. In your case, if you got one table with for each person e.g. father-firstname and father-lastname, and you have multiple people with the same father, this data will be duplicated, and when you discover a typo in the father-lastname, you could modify it for one sibling, and not for the next.
In this simplified case, database design best practices would call for a first normalization into a separate table with father-id, father-firstname and father-lastname, and your person table having a one-to-many relation to it.
For one-to-one relations, e.g. person->personeducationdetails, there's some debate. In the original definition of 1st Normal Form, every optional field would be normalized by putting it's own table. This was later weakened by introducing 'null' in relational databases, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_normal_form#cite_note-CoddRule-12. But still, if a whole set of columns could be null at the same time, you put them in a separate table with a one-to-one relation.
E.g. if you don't know a person's educationdetails, all of its related fields are null, so you better split them off in a separate table, and simply not have a personeducationdetails record for that person.

Related

Should I create three models or a polymorphic type

I have a Laravel 8 application and am wondering how to solve the problem of how to solve a typical polymorphic issue. I have an Employee model. That Employee can be an ExecutiveEmployee or EntryLevelEmployee. There will be methods an ExecutiveEmployee has that an EntryLevelEmployee doesn't have and the inverse is also true.
Using Laravel 8, is it right to create a base Employee model (without a corresponding table?) and then create two models named ExecutiveEmployee and EntryLevelEmployee that inherit from Employee? This would also imply that both employee types will have two different database tables, even though there will be a lot of overlapping data.
Does it make sense to just have one Employee model and create a migration that has the employee type listed in the model? I am assuming that it's ok if an EntryLevelEmployee has some database attributes which are relevant to it that may or may not be relevant to an ExecutiveEmployee type here, or is that an incorrect assumption?
What's the correct way to model this in Laravel 8? I prefer to keep everything in one table because of how similar the models are. I do have to keep in mind that there will be data that one has that the other doesn't. There will be different accessor methods as well.
Is it possible to have everything in one employees table while utilizing multiple models? Meaning, if I create two models named ExecutiveEmployee and EntryLevelEmployee they would both query the underlying table employees?
UPDATE 1
The more I research, the more I think polymorphism is the incorrect approach here and what I might need is Single-Table Inheritance. This package seems to bring the capability to Eloquent. Would there be a good reason to not use this?
I would use polymorphic relationships in this case, because you are more flexible and have less coupling.
Using the Single Table Inheritance (STI), you can add type specific columns in the employees table and make them nullable. But think about adding/removing types in the future.
executive_employees
id - integer
executive_specific - string
entry_level_employees
id - integer
entry_level_specific - string
employees
id - integer
name - string
email - string
employable_id - integer
employable_type - string
As for the STI the same would be
employees
id - integer
name - string
email - string
type - string
executive_specific - nullable string
entry_level_specific - nullable string
So STI would be suitable when you don't have type specific columns. But you want to add specific behavior in your code. For example a User type (Admin, Author).
Even so, it's a matter of preferences.
It really depends on the state and behavior of your employee object.
Below are few points I will consider to make a decision
If your objects' states/properties are different then definitely you will create different models as your data will be stored in different tables.
If most states/properties are same and some are different, you can
consider storing all in one table/model and for the difference in
behavior create separate table like Ron Van Der Heijden has
suggested and you can consider query scope with that to make
transaction with database.
And another view will be
How many JOINs you will create if you will create different tables,
will that impact the performance and other stuffs, will it make your
code complex?
Can you make simpler relations and handle stuffs independently?
When you are making an API, will your
code make the api overworking? or you need to create too many request
for any operation?
These stuffs will decide how you will make a decision.
Update 1:
Another point I would like to add about the package you are thinking to use, consider using a parent key in table and you can define relationships in a single model.I do not think you need to use a package, you can define it yourself, I guess.
I don't understand why you don't create a simple one-to-many relation. Based on the information you provided, the polymorphic relation looks unnecessary. I think the right way is to create employee_roles table and relations. Then you can give different permissions to different employee types. There are several ways to do that. You can create a middleware to create route restrictions. You can check the role before executing a function in the controller, and run only if the employee has permission. You can use if-else in blade not to render the parts that can't be used by auth user etc.
If you have different “types” of employees, and each employee type should have different logic then yeah, that sounds like a polymorphic relationship.

Using a hard-coded set of values in place of a traditional Eloquent model in Laravel

I'd like to create a many-to-many relationship between two things: Notes and Labels. However, I'd like to define the labels themselves in code rather than having them in a database table.
Aside from a notes table to represent the Note model, I expect to have a "pivot" table (labels_notes) with two columns: note_id and label.
So, my question is: How would eager loading, getter, setter and "get notes by label" methods on the Note model work?
Background: The primary reason for wanting the Labels in code rather than as content of a table is that they are a small, fixed set of values; users will not be allowed to modify them. Further, there may need to be special logic in the code around certain labels. I considered storing them in a JSON column on notes, but am concerned about the performance impact when searching for Notes by Label.
The solution I opted for was to use a traditional Eloquent model for Labels (including a dedicated database table), but inject the desired values into it via the migration, and use a string primary key. That way we're able to use Eloquent in it's intended manner rather than fighting against it.
Using a string primary key means we can write logic based around specific Labels without worrying about arbitrary numeric IDs (i.e., "id=news" vs "id=12112"). Note that doing this also requires adding public $incrementing = false; in the Label model class.
Injecting the necessary Labels via migration lets us avoid having an additional setup task when deploying, and also avoids coupling our code with an external process.

Advantage of splitting a table

My question may seems more general. But only answer I got so far is from the SO itself. My question is, I have a table customer information. I have 47 fields in it. Some of the fields are optional. I would like to split that table into two customer_info and customer_additional_info. One of its column is storing a file in byte format. Is there any advantage by splitting the table. I saw that the JOIN will slow down the query execution. Can I have more PROs and CONs of splitting a table into two?
I don't see much advantage in splitting the table unless some of the columns are very infrequently accessed and fairly large. There's a theoretical advantage to keeping rows small as you're going to get more of them in a cached block, and you improve the efficiency of a full table scan and of the buffer cache. Based on that I'd be wary of storing this file column in the customer table if it was more than a very small size.
Other than that, I'd keep it in a single table.
I can think of only 2 arguments in favor of splitting the table:
If all the columns in Customer_Addition_info are related, you could potentially get the benefit of additional declarative data integrity that you couldn't get with a single table. For instance, lets say your addition table was CustomerAddress. Your business logic may dictate that a customer address is optional, but once you have a customer Zip code, the addressL1, City and State become required fields. You could set these columns to non null if they exist in a customerAddress table. You couldn't do that if they existed directly in the customer table.
If you were doing some Object-relational mapping and your had a customer class with many subclasses and you didn't want to use Single Table Inheritance. Sometimes STI creates problems when you have similar properties of various subclasses that require different storage layout. Being that all subclasses have to use the same table, you might have name clashes. The alternative is Class Table inheritance where you have a table for the superclass, and an addition table for each subclass. This is a similar scenario to the one you described in your question.
As for CONS, The join makes things harder and slower. You also run the risk of accidentally creating a 1 to many relationship. I.E. You create 2 addresses in the CustomerAddress table and now you don't know which one is valid.
EDIT:
Let me explain the declarative ref integrity point further.
If your business rules are such that a customer address is optional, and you embed addressL1, addressL2, City, State, and Zip in your customer table, you would need to make each of these fields Nullable. That would allow someone to insert a customer with a City but no state. You could write a table level check constraint to cover this situation. But that isn't as easy as simply setting the AddressL1, City, State and Zip columns in the CustomerAddress table not nullable. To be clear, I am NOT advocating using the multi-table approach. However you asked for Pros and Cons, and I'm just pointing out this aspect falls on the pro side of the ledger.
I second what David Aldridge said, I'd just like to add a point about the file column (presumably BLOB)...
BLOBs are stored up to approx. 4000 bytes in-line1. If a BLOB is used rarely, you can specify DISABLE STORAGE IN ROW to store it out-of-line, removing the "cache pollution" without the need to split the table.
But whatever you do, measure the effects on realistic amounts of data before you make the final decision.
1 That is, in the row itself.

Hbase Schema Nested Entity

Does anyone have an example on how to create an Hbase table with a nested entity?
Example
UserName (string)
SSN (string)
+ Books (collection)
The books collection would look like this for example
Books
isbn
title
etc...
I cannot find a single example are how to create a table like this. I see many people talk about it, and how it is a best practice in certain scenarios, but I cannot find an example on how to do it anywhere.
Thanks...
Nested entities isn't an official feature of HBase; it's just a way some people talk about one usage pattern. In this pattern, you use the fact that "columns" in HBase are really just a big map (a bunch of key/value pairs) to let you to model a dimension of cardinality inside the row by adding one column per "row" of the nested entity.
Schema-wise, you don't need to do much on the table itself; when you create a table in HBase, you just specify the name & column family (and associated properties), like so (in hbase shell):
hbase:001:0> create 'UserWithBooks', 'cf1'
Then, it's up to you what you put in it, column wise. You could insert values like:
hbase:002:0> put 'UsersWithBooks', 'userid1234', 'cf1:username', 'my username'
hbase:003:0> put 'UsersWithBooks', 'userid1234', 'cf1:ssn', 'my ssn'
hbase:004:0> put 'UsersWithBooks', 'userid1234', 'cf1:book_id_12345', '<isbn>12345</isbn><title>mary had a little lamb</title>'
hbase:005:0> put 'UsersWithBooks', 'userid1234', 'cf1:book_id_67890', '<isbn>67890</isbn><title>the importance of being earnest</title>'
The column names are totally up to you, and there's no limit to how many you can have (within reason: see the HBase Reference Guide for more on this). Of course, doing this, you have to do your own legwork re: putting in and getting out values (and you'd probably do it with the java client in a more sophisticated way than I'm doing with these shell commands, they're just for explanatory purposes). And while you can efficiently scan just a portion of the columns in a table by key (using a column pagination filter), you can't do much with the contents of the cells other than pull them and parse them elsewhere.
Why would you do this? Probably just if you wanted atomicity around all the nested rows for one parent row. It's not very common, your best bet is probably to start by modeling them as separate tables, and only move to this approach if you really understand the tradeoffs.
There are some limitations to this. First, this technique only works to
one level deep: your nested entities can’t themselves have nested entities. You can still
have multiple different nested child entities in a single parent, and the column qualifier is their identifying attributes.
Second, it’s not as efficient to access an individual value stored as a nested column
qualifier inside a row, as compared to accessing a row in another table, as you learned
earlier in the chapter.
Still, there are compelling cases where this kind of schema design is appropriate. If
the only way you get at the child entities is via the parent entity, and you’d like to have transactional protection around all children of a parent, this can be the right way to go.

Time table modelling in relational db

I know that it has been told almost anything related to time table modeling in RDBS, but I can not find any well written documentation about available techniques to store time tables in DB.
My case:
I have table which holds available places, and table with actual classes.
Each place has it's own unique schedule
Each class can be scheduled in any place, and any time, with few exceptions:
One class can take one time-slot (Example: If class A is scheduled in place P1 at 12:00 for 1hour duration, next occurrence of class A can only be placed before 12:00 or after 13:00, in any place, which has free time-slot; It's forbidden to schedule class A in one time in two places)
In one place it can be one class with time-slot
Model should support versioning/history of scheduled classes
Now, how I can represent this data model in an SQL DB?
I'm not looking ready-to-use exact schema, rather I will be glad if anyone can write available modelling techniques and their comparison, which I can use to solve this task
For example: For tree-structure/hierarchical data, there is well documented "modified preorder tree traversal algorithm", is there some similar algorithm/technique to deal with time-slots?
A timetable is a matrix. Down the left hand side we have LOCATIONS. Across the top we have TIMESLOTS. The intersection of any given permutation of LOCATION and TIMESLOT is a cell with either a CLASS or null.
To model this we need a table (entity) of LOCATIONS, which is pretty fixed data. We need a table of TIMESLOTS (date/times) which is ever growing. We need a table CLASSES, which is also pretty fixed. Finally we need an intersection table CLASS_TIMESLOT_LOCATIONS. This is where the magic happens. This table has three foreign keys, one to CLASSES, one to LOCATIONS, one to TIMESLOTS. Its primary key is (LOCATION_ID, TIMESLOT_ID) but it also needs a unique constraint on (CLASS_ID, TIMESLOT_ID).
You are asking a modelling question, but there are a couple of implementation details which you will need to think about. They won't chnage the logical model but they will affect how you work with the physical tables. The first consideration is whether to spawn all the potential TIMESLOTS, and, if so, how big a window you store. The second is whether to store null entries for the intersection table, CLASS_TIMESLOT_LOCATIONS.
There are no straightforward answers here: some database products will find it easier to "fill in the gaps" than others. Also, generating the absent records on the fly may be too much of a performance hit, in which case disk space is a good trade-off.
As for storing history, this is presumably for storing changes to the schedule. Use separate tables for this, populated by triggers (you could use stored procedures but triggers is the industry standard). Don't be tempted to store history in the main tables. It breaks the normalised model and causes all sorts of grief.
From what I see in your question it looks like you have several constraints you would like to have handled on the database side.
• I have table which holds available places, and table with actual classes.
More can be elaborated on the table design, but this just needs a table schema to hold the information you need
• Each place has it's own unique schedule
How about creating a trigger on inserts to make sure that the class that is being inserted into the schedule does not conflict with any other schedule?
• Each class can be scheduled in any place, and any time, with few exceptions:
• One class can take one time-slot (Example: If class A is scheduled in place P1 at 12:00 for 1hour duration, next occurrence of class A can only be placed before 12:00 or after 13:00, in any place, witch has free time-slot; It's forbidden to schedule class A in one time in two places)
I would handle this constraint in a trigger also
• In one place it can be one class with time-slot
Have this constraint handled in a trigger
• Model should support versioning/history of scheduled classes
Have a separate table which mirrors the actual table that you have for schedules. As new records get inserted into the main table, you can trigger the updates and times for the updates/inserts/deletes into the table which has the history
Hope this helps you with some ideas.
-Vijay

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